Profile: Francis Ford Coppola (Part 4)

Our friend Trevor Hogg is back at FlickeringMyth with the fourth installment in a 5-part profile of Francis Ford Coppola. An excerpt:

“[Preston Tucker] developed plans for a car way ahead of its time in terms of engineering; yet the auto industry at large stubbornly resisted his innovative ideas,” remarked moviemaker Francis Ford Coppola who wanted to do a musical on the life and times of the post-World War II maverick car designer with Leonard Bernstein composing the music. The project was stalled with the financial collapse of Coppola’s studio. “I thought it was the best project Francis had ever been involved with,” stated filmmaker George Lucas (American Graffiti). “No studio in town would touch it; they all said it was too expensive. They all wanted $15 million Three Men and a Baby [1987] movies or Crocodile Dundee, Part 73 sequels.” Lucas agreed to provide the funding for the $24 million budget which allowed filming to commence on Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), but with some changes to the story. “Francis can get so esoteric it can be hard for an audience to relate to him,” observed the creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movie franchises. “He needs someone to hold him back. With The Godfather [1972], it was Mario Puzo; with Tucker, it was me.” George Lucas added, “I wanted to make it an uplifting experience that showed some of the problems in corporate America, and Francis didn’t resist.”

Coppola’s lack of creative resistance was not due to having a mutually shared vision with Lucas. “I’d lost some of my confidence,” confessed the director. “I knew George had a marketing sense of what the people might want. He wanted to candy-apple it up a bit, make it like a Disney film. He was at the height of his success, and I was at the height of my failure.” Midway through the production Paramount Pictues agreed to cover most of the costs for the picture which stars Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), Martin Landau (Ed Wood), Joan Allen (Manhunter), Frederic Forrest (The Two Jakes), Elias Koteas (The Thin Red Line), Christian Slater (Heathers), Nina Siemaszko (Jakob the Liar), Dean Stockwell (Blue Velvet), Lloyd Bridges (Airplane!) and Peter Donat (The Game). Grossing $20 million domestically, Tucker: The Man and His Dream received Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Martin Landau), Best Art Direction & Set Decoration and Best Costume Design; it also contended for Best Supporting Actor (Martin Landau) at the Golden Globes and was lauded with the BAFTA Award for Best Production Design.

For more, go here.

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, go here. 

For Part 3, go here.